Hell on $5 a Day: I Hate Writing The Synopsis
Posted by Greg Bulmash in Hell on $5, Novels & Stories, tags: adventure novelSo, I've been trying to think of a really compelling synopsis to use as I begin querying agents. I mean, the one on Web Fiction Guide is workable, but not very exciting. I was reading an agent's blog recently (lost the URL), but she said describe it like you'd describe it to a friend. So...
Imagine the Army's "Super Soldier" formula had transformed Steve Rogers into a vampire instead of Captain America, but he retained Cap's essential goodness. Now imagine they also gave it to a handful of iffy characters and put him in charge of commanding the unit while it battled Nazis along the French/German border in 1943. That's Alain: good guy, bad situation, gets worse.
Jump to the present day. Alain survived the war, met and married a mortal woman, and stayed with her until she died of old age. Now he's going to go through Hell (literally) to steal back the "collateral" they took from him and try to get to Heaven to be reunited with her. One hitch in the plan... he's got two mortals he has to keep alive while he does it.
I think it gives away too much. And that leaves me wondering, how do you sell a novel without revealing the juicy bits? I can't jumble together a trailer with a bunch of visual bits that give away little or no story but make you go "ooooh":
- Kurt and Alain running from Cerberus
- Kurt, George, and Junior running ahead of the horde of souls in Purgatory
- Vinnie clotheslines Kurt in the arena
- Kurt leaping on the snake
- the holiometer exploding
- pause the non-stop action for: "I never would have pictured you as a tighty whities guy." -- "You pictured me in my underwear?"
- Kurt decks Mammon
- something from chapter 33 that I can't give away just yet
- the slingshot chair flings the guys out of the cave
- Vinnie and Kurt fall through the portal in slow-motion
- Kurt runs through the first ring's warren of shacks
- end the trailer tight on Charon's incredulous face: "Bouncin' Beelzebub, you're alive."
I can't just grab "ooh, pretty" images and fling them at you in random order so you have no idea of the actual plot, but you get excited by all the action. So I've got to figure out how to describe the plot without giving away the plot.
Any suggestions?
Entries (RSS)
Leave off the bit about the two mortals at the end. the rest seems fine.
My version.
During WWII the US Army started a top secret project to create "Super Soldiers" - by creating vampires. The Army chose only those enlisted men it considered expendable - men with a proven record of violence, men whose souls, they thought, were already damned, men who would not be missed - men like Alain Bordeaux. But official records don't tell everything - and Alain Bordeaux was good. And while the Army could make him a vampire, they couldn't make him evil. Alain's faith was rewarded with the love of a mortal woman, and a form of salvation.
Now, his beloved wife dead of old age, Alain is determined to join her in heaven. To do that, he has to go through Hell, all of Dante's Inferno, and find his lost soul.
Like Readalots' synopsis. His would sell the book.
On a different note, I see I'm not the only one who thought of Captain America as your novel started!
Well, I used this in a recent agent query ("Hi, I wrote a book, would you like to try to sell it?") letter:
I'll consider Readalot's for the next one. I've sent out three query letters, received one response, and they passed after reading the 33-page sample (Chapter 1 up through Alain drinking the lamb's blood). I've got one query letter outstanding. Torn between blasting out 20 queries or trying to do them in batches of one or two.
This will be the third time I've hunted for a literary agent. The first time, I was 22 and got one interested in a screenplay I'd written. But at that time I'd just gone back to college after a couple years off, had the first straight-A report card of my life, and decided to concentrate on school instead of doing the rewrite he wanted. The second time I got an agent for a book proposal based on my "where are they now" column, but she wasn't able to get a publisher on board with it. Based on prior experience, I should be able to get an agent on board. It's just a matter of time.